Five New Spring 2014 exhibitions at the New Museum, New York

The New Museum launches a new series of solo shows, featuring the first New York museum presentations of five young international artists, including a new performance work by Ragnar Kjartansson, an immersive sound installation by Roberto Cuoghi, a survey of videos, sculptures, and drawings by Camille Henrot, and site-specific installations by Hannah Sawtell and David Horvitz. Working across various mediums, the artists are linked by an interest in music, sound, and the circulation of images to represent personal histories and systems of knowledge.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Me, My Mother, My Father, and I, May 7 - June 29, Fourth Floor, Curated by Massimiliano Gioni & Margot Norton

Born into a family of actors and theater professionals, Ragnar Kjartansson draws from a varied history of stage traditions, film, music, and literature. His performances, drawings, paintings, and video installations explore the boundaries between reality and fiction as well as constructs of myth and identity. At the New Museum, Kjartansson presents works with and about his family, including a newly orchestrated performance and video piece titled Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011/2014), in which ten musicians play a live composition for the duration of the exhibition. Other works in the exhibition are made in direct collaboration with Kjartansson's parents, including a new series of images of the sea made with his father, titled Raging Pornographic Sea (drawings)(2014), and an ongoing video collaboration with his mother where she repeatedly spits in his face, Me and My Mother, which began in 2000. 

Roberto Cuoghi: Šuillakku Corral, April 30 - June 29, Third Floor, Curated by Massimiliano Gioni & Margot Norton 

Through an array of unconventional media, Roberto Cuoghi's projects explore ideas of metamorphosis, hybridity, and violence. In the past, he has used mediums such as painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation to confront the challenges of self-representation as well as psychological transformation. For this exhibition, Cuoghi presents Šuillakku – corral version (2014), an immersive sound installation in the form of an imagined ancient Assyrian lament from 612 BC, performed on a collection of handmade instruments carefully researched, built, and played by the artist himself. As in much of Cuoghi's work, the installation explores the ways in which the power of imagination can help transform both history and reality.

Camille Henrot: The Restless Earth, May 7 - June 29, Second Floor, Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari 

The exhibition features four of Camille Henrot's recent videos, including Grosse Fatigue (2013), a standout of the recent Venice Biennale, garnering her the Silver Lion as most promising young artist. The work extends on earlier videos, which capture rituals and landscapes that move across history and bridge disparate cultures and geographies. The exhibition also includes a new installation of Is It Possible to be a Revolutionary and Like Flowers? (2012–14). In this series, Henrot translates books from her library into ikebana arrangements, connecting the languages of literature, anthropology, and philosophy with the language of flowers. In her varied works, Henrot demonstrates how the classification of artifacts and the production of images structure the way we understand the world. 

Hannah Sawtell: ACCUMULATOR, April 23 – June 22, Lobby Gallery, Curated by Helga Christoffersen 

In her work, Hannah Sawtell considers the relationship between the surfaces of images and objects, and the multiplicity of structures that underpin them. Through a variety of media—installation, video, print, radio broadcast, sound, and performance—Sawtell renders the fluidity of digital images with spatial, physical, and temporal qualities, and points to their function as decoy indicators for larger and dominating systems of production, access, surplus, and consumption. For the New Museum, Sawtell has created a new sculptural installation and sound work made specifically for the Lobby Gallery, and has realized a new edition of her "Broadsheets" publication series. 

David Horvitz: Gnomons, May 7 - June 29, Shaft Space, as part of the Stowaways Series, Curated by Helga Christoffersen 

Gnomons, referencing the device on a sundial, which effectively produced the first image of time in the form of a shadow, brings together a selection of David Horvitz's works that grapple with possible manifestations and images of time and standardized measurements. The presentation includes Let us keep our own noon (2013), consisting of 47 handbells activated by 47 performers who, at local noon (when the sun is positioned exactly above the New Museum), collectively ring the bells and then disperse throughout the building and onto the street. For The Distance of a Day (2013), Horvitz journeyed halfway around the world to the exact location where he could see the sunrise in the same moment that his mother was watching the sunset in California.